The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson PDF
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This page intentionally left blank THE AGE OF ELIZABETH IN THE AGE OF JOHNSON In The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson, Jack Lynch explores eighteenth-centuryBritishconceptionsoftheRenaissance,andthe historical,intellectual,andculturalusestowhichthepastwasput during the period. Scholars, editors, historians, religious thinkers, linguists,andliterarycriticsalldefinedthemselvesinrelationto“the last age” or “the age of Elizabeth.” Seventeenth- and eighteenth- centurythinkersreworkedolderhistoricalschemestosuittheirown needs,turningtotheageofPetrarchandPoliziano,Erasmusand Scaliger,Shakespeare,Spenser,andQueenElizabethtodefinetheir cultureincontrasttotheprecedingage.Theyderivedapowerful sense of modernity from the comparison, which proved essential to the constitution of a national character. This interdisciplinary study will be of interest to cultural as well as literary historians of theeighteenthcentury. isassistantprofessorofEnglishatRutgersUniversity. Heisco-editor,withPaulJ.Korshin,ofTheAgeofJohnson:ASchol- arly Annual. He is the author of A Bibliography of Johnsonian Studies, – () and Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary: Selections from the WorkthatDefinedtheEnglishLanguage(). THE AGE OF ELIZABETH IN THE AGE OF JOHNSON JACK LYNCH Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge , United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521819077 © Jack Lynch 2003 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. 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Contents Preface page vi Noteonthetextsandcitation x Listofabbreviations xi Introduction Strugglingtoemergefrombarbarity:historiographyand theideaoftheclassic Learning’striumph:historicismandthespiritoftheage CallBritannia’sgloriesbacktoview:Tudorhistoryand Hanoverianhistorians TherageofReformation:religiouscontroversyand politicalstability Theground-workofstile:languageandnationalidentity Studiedbarbarity:Jonson,Spenser,andtheidea ofprogress Thelastage:Renaissancelost Notes Bibliography Index v Preface Perhaps it is best to begin with what this book is not. It is not a cata- logue of Renaissance sources and analogues for Johnson’s works: W.B.C.Watkinsproducedsuchalistin,andmorethansixdecades lateritneedslittlemodification.Nordoesitchronicleeighteenth-century responsestothemajorworksandauthorsoftheEnglishRenaissance– what Johnson’s contemporaries had to say about Skelton, for instance, orMarlowe–sincethattaskisablyfulfilledbyRoutledge’sCriticalHeritage series and other reception histories. Neither yet does it tell the story of eighteenth-centuryShakespeareanismorMiltonism,whichcriticssuch as G. F. Parker, Michael Dobson, Jean Marsden, Margreta de Grazia, andDustinGriffinhavedoneadmirably.Mywork,thoughindebtedto all of these, follows a different path, one pointed out, if not blazed, by Rene´ Wellek. In , Wellek proposed “A ‘History of English Literary History,’” which he believed “a legitimate and even urgent task of Englishscholarship”(Wellek,TheRiseofEnglishLiteraryHistory,p.v).In theinterveninghalf-century,fewhavesharedWellek’ssenseofurgency; but it may now be time to synthesize the scholarship on the history of literatureandofliterarystudies,andtotrytodiscernsignificantpatterns. Thisbookisjustsuchanessayinthehistoryofliteraryhistory:itisa studyoftheeighteenthcentury’sconceptionoftheerawehavecometo calltheRenaissance.ItaddressesthewaysinwhichtheageofElizabeth, Shakespeare,andMiltonwasconceivedasaliteraryandculturalepoch inGreatBritain.ForthefirsttimesincetheItalianhumanistsinsistedon their own break with their putatively barbarous medieval past, British writers looked back on the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries and saw not continuity but a break – they looked at their predecessors across an epochal chasm. Elizabeth’s age was treated as a period both chronologically and temperamentally distant from the age of Johnson. More important, eighteenth-century thinkers, by marking the terminus adquemofthepreviousage,markedtheterminusaquooftheirown;their vi Preface vii sense of their own cultural identity was inseparable from the identity of their ancestors. I argue, therefore, that historiography amounts to culturalself-constitution,andfocusontheusestowhichthisideaof“the lastage”wasput.AtthecenteroftheprojectstandsSamuelJohnson,one ofthemostperceptiveculturalhistoriographersofthecentury,through whoseworksflowthemostimportantcurrentsofcontemporarythought. Johnson is our guide to the various and often competing discourses of theculturalhistoryoftheRenaissance. This work, then, has two central concerns. The first is to argue that eighteenth-century British thinkers had a notion of what we now call the Renaissance and that, while it differs in many respects from our own essentially Burckhardtian Renaissance, it was a genuine periodic conception of the age as a whole. The second is to demonstrate the importance of historiographical language, metaphors, and methods in the culture of the eighteenth century, and thereby to show how histo- riography is inseparable from cultural identity. I argue, in other words, thateighteenth-centuryBritishidentityistightlyboundupwithwhatit meanttobemodern. “Modern”is,ofcourse,anotoriouslyslipperyterm,andneverhasa single meaning. Many periodic schemes are operating within a culture atanytime:todaywemeasurethelifetimeofthemodernlanguagesin centuries, modern art in decades, modern popular music in years, and modern computer equipment in months. Even in academic historical discourse,whereonemightexpectgreaterprecision,theword“modern” may legitimately mean post-classical or post-medieval, post-Industrial Revolution or post-Great War – though always post-something, since the present derives its identity from comparison with the past. None of theseschemesofperiodizationnecessarilycontradictsanyoftheothers, whether in the eighteenth century or the twenty-first. When I make claimsaboutperiodization,therefore,Iamfocusingononlyoneofthe many ways eighteenth-century Britons divided history, the one I find most illuminating. There were others, as when critics like Blackmore and Ferguson drew up schemes for a universal history that subsumed dozensofcenturiesunderasinglerubric,or(conversely)whenwritersin theslookedbackonAddisonandSteeleinthesandremarked onthegreatdistancethatseparatedtheirages. Ihavehadtobeveryselective.MuchcanbesaidaboutContinental attitudes toward the past, but my attention is focused on Britain. I do not want to suggest that the Renaissance is the only context, or even themostimportantcontext,inwhichtounderstandeighteenth-century viii Preface British culture: Johnson’s age defined itself in relation to antiquity and the Middle Ages, France and Spain, the Druids and the Tahitians. Its culturecannotbereducedtoamerereactiontothecultureoftwocen- turiesbefore.Therevivaloflearningis,however,animportantcontext, and while I do not presume to present a comprehensive account of eighteenth-century identity, I try to pay attention to the part one age played in forming another. Even this is far too large a question for any single study to cover definitively, and much has been omitted. Bacon’s placeineighteenth-centuryscience;Castiglione’sroleinnewnotionsof politeness;Reynolds’slatefascinationwithMichelangelo;Shakespeare’s influenceonsensibility–alldeserveinquiry,butlimitationsoftimeand spacehavekeptthemoutofthisbook. Nomenclatureisinevitablyaproblemindiscussinganotionthathad not yet received a name. A formulation like “Johnson’s Renaissance” isenticingbutdangerouslyanachronistic:itwouldhavemadenosense to Johnson himself. As I argue in the Introduction and throughout this work,though,Ibelievethattheeighteenthcenturyhadanascentperiodic conception,howeverinchoate,oftheyearsfromroughlythebeginning of the fifteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth. Using strictly eighteenth-centuryterminology(“therestorationofpoliteletters”)would bemisleadingand,aftertwentyorthirtyappearances,positivelycloying. Relyingonmorecautiouscircumlocutions,ontheotherhand,wouldbe tooself-conscious,andwouldperhapsaddlittleprecision.Myapproach isthereforeunapologeticallyeclectic–sometimesuncriticallyborrowing terms like “the revival of learning” and even “the Dark Ages” (though always, I hope, with the understanding that the terms are not mine), sometimes using comparatively value-free terms like “the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,” but often simply using the word “Renaissance” to refer to a period that at least chronologically approximates our own idea of the word – or did, before “early modern” began to edge out “Renaissance”inEnglishandhistorydepartments. WithotherperiodictermsIhavebeenlesscavalier.Ihave,forinstance, avoided calling the eighteenth century “Neoclassical,” “Augustan,” or “Enlightenment.”Suchtermsarealwaysreductiveandoftendeceptive, and while their histories would make for an interesting study, it is not mine.Thatleavesnoconvenientlabel,however,forBritain’snotoriously “long”eighteenthcentury;by“eighteenthcentury”Iusuallymeanthe Restorationandeighteenthcentury,fromroughlyto,andtry tobeexplicitwheneverconfusionisarealthreat.
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